How old am I? Old enough to have ridden the East Jefferson streetcar with my grandmother to shop at Hudson’s in downtown Detroit in the mid-1950s. This was right before they tore out the trolley tracks and long before they tore down the department store.
So I have mixed feelings about downtown streets and mass transit. It was great to see the Motor City’s annual, late-spring Grand Prix car race back downtown this month and off Belle Isle for the first time since 1992.
The riverfront glittered for national television on a sparkling day that saw Spain’s Alex Palou beat Australia’s Will Power by just 1.1843 seconds. The camerawork (and sound effects) of the IndyCars brought across a visceral thrill that must have been greater for those who were there.
A viewer need not be a gearhead to sense the tension and danger of aggressive cutoffs and jostling wheels at high speed on narrow and bumpy roads that some of us drive and survive on a regular basis around the Renaissance Center.
Down the road, I look forward, once again, to the Woodward Dream Cruise in the late summer, our annual automotive Mardi Gras that begins at the city limits — eight miles north of the temporary downtown race track — and proceeds further north for eight more miles.
This Cruise will be the inverse of the Prix. Instead of watching the latest in high-tech vehicles at close to 200 miles per hour, we will gaze in admiration at a slow procession of gas-guzzling dinosaur antiques, many of them evoking the youth of the Baby Boomers.
Their engines will purr, growl, and roar and their tires will burn rubber as we cheer from the curbs in the ‘burbs.
But along with these pleasant, warm-weather events comes another reality of our car culture at this time of year. For this is the season of thrill-driving at high speeds, often by young drivers with several peers in the same vehicle, egging on deadly outbursts of toxic masculinity.
The worst of it occurred on Mother’s Day with four young men in their early 20s riding together in a speeding, sport utility vehicle on I-96 on the Westside. It must’ve been fun until the driver lost control of the three-ton, white, GMC Denali.
According to State Police First Lt. Michael Shaw, the SUV “did strike the median wall, skidded along the wall, and then into a bridge pillar causing catastrophic damage to the vehicle and occupants.” Witnesses said all four bodies were thrown from the crushed vehicle.
Mercifully, they probably died instantly, without suffering. Fortunately, they didn’t hurt any other people in other cars. And that’s always the fear, isn’t it: That one of these thrill-seekers will kill you or your loved ones as you drive to work or school. Speaking of school: Graduation season often brings an increase in joy-riding.
So, how much does our car worship at events like the Prix and the Cruise contribute to our worst driving habits? And what does our car culture say about us?
“A civilization can’t hide its values from itself,” Adam Gopnik wrote recently in The New Yorker, adding, “It is not only that the car provides autonomy; it provides privacy. Cars are confession booths, music studios, bedrooms … The grip of the car as a metaphor for liberty is as firm as that of guns, if perhaps with similarly destructive results.”
In part, Gopnik’s essay reviewed the new book Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It, by Daniel Knowles. The author makes a plea for mass transit with chapters like “Detroit Breakdown,” “Evil Carmakers,” and “Gas Guzzler Nation.”
“Cars that are safe to drive are boring,” Knowles writes, “and roads that force you to slow down are also boring. Boring, for the most part, does not sell cars, and it certainly does not sell the giant trucks, SUVs, or exceptionally powerful sports cars on which carmakers make their biggest profit margins.”
Knowles writes of the psychology of sitting high up behind the steering wheel of a pickup truck, of how it makes you feel like “a rugged sort of individual, ready to conquer mountains, even if in reality you are using it to pick up groceries at Walmart and drop the kids off at soccer practice.”
When we buy cars, he suggests, we buy mythology.
“Car manufacturers want us to believe that driving is freedom,” he writes. “But, in fact, we are trapping ourselves in an enormous prison made up of moving metal cells.”
By designing our suburban landscapes and lifestyles around cars, he asserts, we’ve made walking perilous while destroying the population density that made mass transit — streetcars, subways, or elevated rail — logical, practical, and efficient 100 years ago.
“When everybody’s homes are already so spread out, it is difficult to make public transport work,” Knowles writes. “Cities end up with, at best, buses, used mostly only by those people unable to afford their own cars.”
Sounds as if he is describing metro Detroit. As someone who has also lived in both Chicago and New York, I miss mass, train-rail transit and wish we had it here. Alas, my hometown — on this issue — long ago missed the boat, so to speak.
That said, I’ll drive to Royal Oak for the Dream Cruise on Saturday, Aug. 19, and I’ll find a free space to park. I tend to applaud most for the ’65 Mustangs, the ’57 Chevy Bel Airs, all ‘Vettes, of course, the rare Model T, and anything painted candy-apple red.
And, next spring, I might even buy a ticket for the next Grand Prix or maybe watch for free from the public platforms on East Jefferson, atop where the streetcar rails once carried commuters. Might be a good place to see a race. Some of this might sound contradictory but, then again, I’m a Detroiter.
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